Lorgren sits on the House subcommittees for intellectual properties and immigration enforcement. Immigration in general, and enforcement in particular, is considered to be a federal issue.
So what's weird is her quote has nothing to do with the immigration issue. It has everything to do with the perceived messages of UCSF outsourcing jobs. If she thought that was illegal in some form, isn't that what she should be quoted on?
Feinstein also sits on Senate subcommittees for technology and immigration.
Similarly, Senator Feinstein's letter was all about UC's civic responsibilities and the wisdom of outsourcing jobs. That's not really about technology or immigration, it's a labor issue more than anything else. As such, I don't see why I would consider her opinion any more important than mine. Remember, we live in a federal republic. California and UC can do whatever it wants. Until it crosses a state border, the feds have no say in the matter. As such, I'd prefer the honorables restrict their comments to the immigration issues, which I understand is questionable.
Here's the thing: opinions are like a**holes, everyone has one. I've got an opinion on this, DiFi has, Zoe has, you have, everyone has. As a UC parent and taxpayer, I think my opinion matters at least a little but not all that much. I don't think Lofgrin's or Feinstein's opinions matter any more than mine (maybe less, do they have kids at UC?) I think the opinion of the director of IT at UC matters a lot. I think the opinions of the IT people being outsourced matters quite a bit, at least in terms of whether this is a feasible activity (but they'd have to be saints not to be biased against it).
I've been emailing the author. I still can't figure out why anyone cares what Rep. Lorgren thinks about this. It isn't in her district and it isn't a federal issue. Her opinion is about as useful as mine. Ditto Senator Feinstein.
TFA mentioned Rep. Nancy Pelosi but at least this is happening in her district.
For fun, I looked up the UC budget. Something like 10-15% comes direct from the state (10% state general funds, 4% UC general funds, whatever that is). Tuition is around 11%.
Most of the money comes from "Medical Centers" and "Other sales and services", that's a hair north of 40%.
I had absolutely no idea. I thought state general funding would be over 50% of the budget. You learn something new every day.
...I gotta wear 3D glasses. Sorry, couldn't help myself.
I'm a grouchy old dinosaur so I've never shelled out for a 3D movie. I've never even really been tempted, I'd rather buy popcorn for the extra $5. So, I never saw a bright future for a 3D TV, it always seemed like a gimmick to sell more TV screens. Frankly, I'm surprised they keep making 3D movies. I thought the fad would peter out years ago.
I did buy a Blu-Ray player which can play 3D movies but since that never got in my way, I didn't care. It plays disks and streams Netflix, that's all I need it to do.
I don't know about anyone else but the moment I started using Pandora and then Spotify, that's the moment I knew this was the future of music.
I couldn't have predicted how much profit there was to be made but I could tell you, buying music was dead. Any profits were going to have to be made from streaming. Oh, and live shows. CD? Dead. Downloads? Dead! Niedermeier? DEAD!!
Great Grandpa didn't get a choice on where to live when the CCC sent him around the country building up infrastructure (which we're in need of right now). Grandpa didn't get a choice when the US government said he was going to "mork" with some Germans. Dad didn't get a choice when the US said he was going to "Work" in Asia.
I'm not sure your point applies. Other than getting drafted and sent to Europe, I don't think many people have been forcibly coerced into moving around. Most of US history is dominated by people voluntarily moving to follow the opportunities, both immigrants and internal migrations.
There are jobs all across the US. Technical jobs. Jobs that you can use to put you self through a community college to get a better job, in a better location. (Repeat, rinse, move up).
Yes, I believe that too. The point of the article was that people are behaving differently now than in the past. In the past, people picked up and moved. Today people seem more inclined to stay put and suffer through it. Why the change is an interesting and important question. I've got lots of theories but it would take some serious study to prove it.
So they do have homes, even if they aren't necessarily the most comfortable ones. That's a big difference from not having any sort of a home at all, which is what homelessness really is.
TFA mentioned that some share actual houses, others are living in RVs and shelters. I guess you could call an RV a permanent home, maybe. As homes go, it's pretty close to bottom of the barrel in the US today. Living in a shelter, yeah, I'd call that homeless. Beats camping in a freeway interchange but not by much.
It would be better if they broke those out into separate categories. Maybe there's a report with more details instead of a article in a newspaper.
Bottom line, there are some very poor people in this valley. No kidding, there are poor people everywhere. In a generous, compassionate world, we would do something for them (hey, how about removing zoning rules which make it hard to build houses?). Let's also not forget that a RV is a castle compared to a shack made of scrap like the shantytowns 400 miles from here in Mexico.
Living conditions there are awful. There are plenty of jobs in other cities and you get to have a whole house!
I just read an article (sadly, I can't remember where) talking about this. One of the differences today from yesteryear is people don't move to where the jobs are as much as they did in the past. That's odd because we're, on a whole, much wealthier than we were before 1900, when it was pretty common to pack up all your belongings in a wagon, abandon your land, and move west. Or have a mass migration from farms to cities throughout most of the 20th century.
Well, I assume it was common. I actually don't have any numbers to back that up. Maybe that's nostalgia talking.
And the point is, we don't yet know whether self driving cars will enhance or reduce safety. I'm dying, as it were, to find out.
(I'm also not clear why the safety and injury treatment features of regular cars don't carry over to self-driving cars.)
I think lost in the noise is exactly what these cars are. They're similar to the Google cars and Teslas: they have pedals, a steering wheel, and a human driver. They're not the self-driving taxis out of Total Recall.
"Arizona is willing to accept some risk to advance our economy and the entrepreneurial spirit of Arizona. We are sons of pioneers; exploration and its risks are part of who we are."
Sounds like exactly what they're doing. Good for them. Someone should give this a try. If Arizona has a greater risk tolerance, then Federalism is working.
Don't forget my favorite, The Man in the High Castle. Amazon just released season 2. I don't know what's going to happen, they're already past the end of the novel.
Still can't decide what I feel about Obergruppenfueher Smith. Honorable or evil?
Check out the WebKit project, build it yourself, and run it under Xcode's profiling tools.
Absolutely. The answer to all performance questions is either "it's complicated" or "it depends".
We can speculate all we want. As others have posted, it's not a simple answer. Hardware, network, software choices, browsing patterns, what sites you're going to, all of that contributes to the issue. There is no generic answer.
For some reason, that reminds me of an old war story. I used to work at a government contractor. Our group built air traffic control systems. In the next building, they built missile guidance systems. We joked it was the same software, just with a sign change.
I don't know anyone has any concrete proposals for how this would work, what each car would transmit, what it would receive, or what it's expected to do with the data.
The problem, as I think about it, is we've got a chicken and the egg problem. I'd love to say that the manufacturers should experiment, try some stuff out, and converge on some recommendations. Problem is, it's kind of useless to have all that expensive gear in my car if no one else does. There'd be no one listening and no one talking to me. So how to get the ball rolling?
Maybe this is the way. Mandate that by 2020 (or whatever) every car must transmit some minimal data. Ignore the tinfoil hat theories about your every move being tracked (it probably is already anyway, thanks to toll bridge transponders and license plate scanners). That will make it much more reasonable to add receivers to cars a few years later, now that a substantial portion of cars are transmitting.
Oh, all this presumes that V2V communication is actually a good thing and worth the cost. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It could be a solution looking for a problem. Do we have any reason to believe this is a better way to spend our money instead of making stronger bumpers?
Really? What makes you think resellers are a problem? They serve a useful purpose: they make sure tickets go to those who value them most (as measured in dollars). Absent resellers, we allocate tickets to people who happen to have free time right when the tickets go for sale online. Why is one better than the other?
Being able to resell tickets also has some real practical benefits. What do you do if you find you can't make an event for which you bought tickets? What if you decide at the last minute you'd like to take a date to a really special event? What if you break up with that special someone and really don't want to go to the show? What if you didn't hear about the show in time and really want the ticket more than someone else?
All that's ignoring the moral perspective. Why should I not be at liberty to sell a ticket I legally purchased? We generally let people resell all sorts of things, why should tickets be different?
Sadly, we don't have a way to allocate tickets to the most ardent fans. That might be cool but it's really hard to pull off. We can't compare the real world against some imagined ideal. We have to compare against real alternatives with real people.
Really? Why? What exactly are they doing wrong and why is it wrong?
That you don't like the prices doesn't make it wrong. There are lots of things which are more expensive and harder to get than I'd like. That doesn't mean the seller is doing anything wrong.
Ah. Yes, you're probably right. IANAL but I think the bonds are owned by an overseas holding company so they can't be uses as collateral for the parent company's loan. There are probably also rules about the overseas subsidiary buying an office building in the US and leasing it back to the parent.
The one thing I've learned about tax law is a zillion clever lawyers, legislators, and accountants have thought of every loophole I can and plugged them all. That's why I'm no good at writing security software either, I'm not devious enough.
Solution? That presumes there's a problem. Which is what, exactly? That ticket prices are higher than you'd like? That there are too few tickets? Welcome to a world filled with scarcity. There is no way for everyone to get everything they want. The only question is how do we decide who gets what? For most things, we use a price system. Why are tickets special?
If I were in charge of tickets for something like a pro sports team, the system I would use would be to put the tickets on sale at some ridiculous price, and announce that the price would drop 1% every four hours, or something like that.
That's essentially a dutch auction. You keep accepting bids until you find the highest price which clears the market. Everyone pays the market clearing price.
Stock market IPOs should work like this too. It ensures the company raises the maximum amount of capital. IIRC, that's how Google did their IPO, more or less. Underwriters hate the idea, surprise, surprise.
For fun, look up margarine regulation. I listened to a fun but infuriating podcast on this a while back. You can either laugh or cry.
Fun fact: in Wisconsin (today, in 2016, not ancient times) it is illegal to put margarine on a restaurant table without the patron explicitly asking for it.
I'm convinced there's no area of life so trivial and unimportant that some buttinski won't have a financial interest in seeing it regulated.
I think the point is that Apple has effectively repatriated their earnings into the next best thing to US dollars, and done it without paying taxes.
Buying bonds is a lot less good than having bags of cash in Cupertino. If they repatriated and paid the taxes, they could buy buildings, companies, politicians, all sorts of goodies. As it is now, the money is parked and unavailable.
I wonder if they could use the bonds as collateral for a loan. That would essentially repatriate and probably be cheaper than paying the tax.
Does Congress not have more important things to do than meddle in people buying and reselling products?
Tickets are scarce. Yesterday they were allocated to people with the most money. Today they're allocated to people with enough free time to hit F5 on the web site the day they go on sale.
People buy and mark up products all the time (that's what wholesalers, distributors, and retailers do all day). Why should we consider tickets any different? If you don't like markup going to resellers instead of artists, tell the artists to have more shows or set the initial price higher. It's a problem the artists and venues could solve all by themselves if they wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, thanks for the context.
Lorgren sits on the House subcommittees for intellectual properties and immigration enforcement. Immigration in general, and enforcement in particular, is considered to be a federal issue.
So what's weird is her quote has nothing to do with the immigration issue. It has everything to do with the perceived messages of UCSF outsourcing jobs. If she thought that was illegal in some form, isn't that what she should be quoted on?
Feinstein also sits on Senate subcommittees for technology and immigration.
Similarly, Senator Feinstein's letter was all about UC's civic responsibilities and the wisdom of outsourcing jobs. That's not really about technology or immigration, it's a labor issue more than anything else. As such, I don't see why I would consider her opinion any more important than mine. Remember, we live in a federal republic. California and UC can do whatever it wants. Until it crosses a state border, the feds have no say in the matter. As such, I'd prefer the honorables restrict their comments to the immigration issues, which I understand is questionable.
Here's the thing: opinions are like a**holes, everyone has one. I've got an opinion on this, DiFi has, Zoe has, you have, everyone has. As a UC parent and taxpayer, I think my opinion matters at least a little but not all that much. I don't think Lofgrin's or Feinstein's opinions matter any more than mine (maybe less, do they have kids at UC?) I think the opinion of the director of IT at UC matters a lot. I think the opinions of the IT people being outsourced matters quite a bit, at least in terms of whether this is a feasible activity (but they'd have to be saints not to be biased against it).
Does that make sense?
I've been emailing the author. I still can't figure out why anyone cares what Rep. Lorgren thinks about this. It isn't in her district and it isn't a federal issue. Her opinion is about as useful as mine. Ditto Senator Feinstein.
TFA mentioned Rep. Nancy Pelosi but at least this is happening in her district.
For fun, I looked up the UC budget. Something like 10-15% comes direct from the state (10% state general funds, 4% UC general funds, whatever that is). Tuition is around 11%.
Most of the money comes from "Medical Centers" and "Other sales and services", that's a hair north of 40%.
I had absolutely no idea. I thought state general funding would be over 50% of the budget. You learn something new every day.
http://www.ucop.edu/operating-...
...I gotta wear 3D glasses. Sorry, couldn't help myself.
I'm a grouchy old dinosaur so I've never shelled out for a 3D movie. I've never even really been tempted, I'd rather buy popcorn for the extra $5. So, I never saw a bright future for a 3D TV, it always seemed like a gimmick to sell more TV screens. Frankly, I'm surprised they keep making 3D movies. I thought the fad would peter out years ago.
I did buy a Blu-Ray player which can play 3D movies but since that never got in my way, I didn't care. It plays disks and streams Netflix, that's all I need it to do.
I don't know about anyone else but the moment I started using Pandora and then Spotify, that's the moment I knew this was the future of music.
I couldn't have predicted how much profit there was to be made but I could tell you, buying music was dead. Any profits were going to have to be made from streaming. Oh, and live shows. CD? Dead. Downloads? Dead! Niedermeier? DEAD!!
"sharing homes" doesn't mean "splitting rent"...
And you know this how? TFA didn't get into that sort of detail.
I have no idea how many of the people the article is about split rent, couch surf, or park their RVs in an empty lot until asked to move. Do you?
Great Grandpa didn't get a choice on where to live when the CCC sent him around the country building up infrastructure (which we're in need of right now). Grandpa didn't get a choice when the US government said he was going to "mork" with some Germans. Dad didn't get a choice when the US said he was going to "Work" in Asia.
I'm not sure your point applies. Other than getting drafted and sent to Europe, I don't think many people have been forcibly coerced into moving around. Most of US history is dominated by people voluntarily moving to follow the opportunities, both immigrants and internal migrations.
There are jobs all across the US. Technical jobs. Jobs that you can use to put you self through a community college to get a better job, in a better location. (Repeat, rinse, move up).
Yes, I believe that too. The point of the article was that people are behaving differently now than in the past. In the past, people picked up and moved. Today people seem more inclined to stay put and suffer through it. Why the change is an interesting and important question. I've got lots of theories but it would take some serious study to prove it.
So they do have homes, even if they aren't necessarily the most comfortable ones. That's a big difference from not having any sort of a home at all, which is what homelessness really is.
TFA mentioned that some share actual houses, others are living in RVs and shelters. I guess you could call an RV a permanent home, maybe. As homes go, it's pretty close to bottom of the barrel in the US today. Living in a shelter, yeah, I'd call that homeless. Beats camping in a freeway interchange but not by much.
It would be better if they broke those out into separate categories. Maybe there's a report with more details instead of a article in a newspaper.
Bottom line, there are some very poor people in this valley. No kidding, there are poor people everywhere. In a generous, compassionate world, we would do something for them (hey, how about removing zoning rules which make it hard to build houses?). Let's also not forget that a RV is a castle compared to a shack made of scrap like the shantytowns 400 miles from here in Mexico.
Living conditions there are awful. There are plenty of jobs in other cities and you get to have a whole house!
I just read an article (sadly, I can't remember where) talking about this. One of the differences today from yesteryear is people don't move to where the jobs are as much as they did in the past. That's odd because we're, on a whole, much wealthier than we were before 1900, when it was pretty common to pack up all your belongings in a wagon, abandon your land, and move west. Or have a mass migration from farms to cities throughout most of the 20th century.
Well, I assume it was common. I actually don't have any numbers to back that up. Maybe that's nostalgia talking.
And the point is, we don't yet know whether self driving cars will enhance or reduce safety. I'm dying, as it were, to find out.
(I'm also not clear why the safety and injury treatment features of regular cars don't carry over to self-driving cars.)
I think lost in the noise is exactly what these cars are. They're similar to the Google cars and Teslas: they have pedals, a steering wheel, and a human driver. They're not the self-driving taxis out of Total Recall.
"Arizona is willing to accept some risk to advance our economy and the entrepreneurial spirit of Arizona. We are sons of pioneers; exploration and its risks are part of who we are."
Sounds like exactly what they're doing. Good for them. Someone should give this a try. If Arizona has a greater risk tolerance, then Federalism is working.
Don't forget my favorite, The Man in the High Castle. Amazon just released season 2. I don't know what's going to happen, they're already past the end of the novel.
Still can't decide what I feel about Obergruppenfueher Smith. Honorable or evil?
Check out the WebKit project, build it yourself, and run it under Xcode's profiling tools.
Absolutely. The answer to all performance questions is either "it's complicated" or "it depends".
We can speculate all we want. As others have posted, it's not a simple answer. Hardware, network, software choices, browsing patterns, what sites you're going to, all of that contributes to the issue. There is no generic answer.
-- Pete
Yet another reason to go slow, and I don't mean on the road.
I remember years ago thinking about car-to-car SMS. Then I wondered how many road rage incidents it would cause and decided it was a horrible idea.
For some reason, that reminds me of an old war story. I used to work at a government contractor. Our group built air traffic control systems. In the next building, they built missile guidance systems. We joked it was the same software, just with a sign change.
I don't know anyone has any concrete proposals for how this would work, what each car would transmit, what it would receive, or what it's expected to do with the data.
The problem, as I think about it, is we've got a chicken and the egg problem. I'd love to say that the manufacturers should experiment, try some stuff out, and converge on some recommendations. Problem is, it's kind of useless to have all that expensive gear in my car if no one else does. There'd be no one listening and no one talking to me. So how to get the ball rolling?
Maybe this is the way. Mandate that by 2020 (or whatever) every car must transmit some minimal data. Ignore the tinfoil hat theories about your every move being tracked (it probably is already anyway, thanks to toll bridge transponders and license plate scanners). That will make it much more reasonable to add receivers to cars a few years later, now that a substantial portion of cars are transmitting.
Oh, all this presumes that V2V communication is actually a good thing and worth the cost. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It could be a solution looking for a problem. Do we have any reason to believe this is a better way to spend our money instead of making stronger bumpers?
Scalpers are a problem...
Really? What makes you think resellers are a problem? They serve a useful purpose: they make sure tickets go to those who value them most (as measured in dollars). Absent resellers, we allocate tickets to people who happen to have free time right when the tickets go for sale online. Why is one better than the other?
Being able to resell tickets also has some real practical benefits. What do you do if you find you can't make an event for which you bought tickets? What if you decide at the last minute you'd like to take a date to a really special event? What if you break up with that special someone and really don't want to go to the show? What if you didn't hear about the show in time and really want the ticket more than someone else?
All that's ignoring the moral perspective. Why should I not be at liberty to sell a ticket I legally purchased? We generally let people resell all sorts of things, why should tickets be different?
Sadly, we don't have a way to allocate tickets to the most ardent fans. That might be cool but it's really hard to pull off. We can't compare the real world against some imagined ideal. We have to compare against real alternatives with real people.
Better to punish scalpers than to enable them.
Really? Why? What exactly are they doing wrong and why is it wrong?
That you don't like the prices doesn't make it wrong. There are lots of things which are more expensive and harder to get than I'd like. That doesn't mean the seller is doing anything wrong.
Ah. Yes, you're probably right. IANAL but I think the bonds are owned by an overseas holding company so they can't be uses as collateral for the parent company's loan. There are probably also rules about the overseas subsidiary buying an office building in the US and leasing it back to the parent.
The one thing I've learned about tax law is a zillion clever lawyers, legislators, and accountants have thought of every loophole I can and plugged them all. That's why I'm no good at writing security software either, I'm not devious enough.
A possible solution is...
Solution? That presumes there's a problem. Which is what, exactly? That ticket prices are higher than you'd like? That there are too few tickets? Welcome to a world filled with scarcity. There is no way for everyone to get everything they want. The only question is how do we decide who gets what? For most things, we use a price system. Why are tickets special?
If I were in charge of tickets for something like a pro sports team, the system I would use would be to put the tickets on sale at some ridiculous price, and announce that the price would drop 1% every four hours, or something like that.
That's essentially a dutch auction. You keep accepting bids until you find the highest price which clears the market. Everyone pays the market clearing price.
Stock market IPOs should work like this too. It ensures the company raises the maximum amount of capital. IIRC, that's how Google did their IPO, more or less. Underwriters hate the idea, surprise, surprise.
For fun, look up margarine regulation. I listened to a fun but infuriating podcast on this a while back. You can either laugh or cry.
Fun fact: in Wisconsin (today, in 2016, not ancient times) it is illegal to put margarine on a restaurant table without the patron explicitly asking for it.
I'm convinced there's no area of life so trivial and unimportant that some buttinski won't have a financial interest in seeing it regulated.
Does Congress not have more important things to do
You don't really understand how Congress and Committees and subcommittees work do you?
Good point. If they're busy getting bribed to solve a non-problem, maybe they won't get around to screwing up something important.
Nah. Congress has an infinite capacity to screw things up for brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions.
I think the point is that Apple has effectively repatriated their earnings into the next best thing to US dollars, and done it without paying taxes.
Buying bonds is a lot less good than having bags of cash in Cupertino. If they repatriated and paid the taxes, they could buy buildings, companies, politicians, all sorts of goodies. As it is now, the money is parked and unavailable.
I wonder if they could use the bonds as collateral for a loan. That would essentially repatriate and probably be cheaper than paying the tax.
Does Congress not have more important things to do than meddle in people buying and reselling products?
Tickets are scarce. Yesterday they were allocated to people with the most money. Today they're allocated to people with enough free time to hit F5 on the web site the day they go on sale.
People buy and mark up products all the time (that's what wholesalers, distributors, and retailers do all day). Why should we consider tickets any different? If you don't like markup going to resellers instead of artists, tell the artists to have more shows or set the initial price higher. It's a problem the artists and venues could solve all by themselves if they wanted to.